Causativity in zero and overt nominalizations: An experimental study

Gianina Iordăchioaia (University of Graz) – Jeannique Darby (University College Volda)

FULL TEXT

ABSTRACT (en)

We experimentally evaluate three patterns of deverbal nominalizations derived by means of zero, -ing and Romance suffixes (i.e., -(at)ion, -ment, and -ance) in English as to whether they can express causativity and anticausativity like their base verbs. We report the results of a first study which uses native speaker judgments to test the acceptability of these competing nominalizing suffixes (-ing vs. zero and -ing vs. Romance suffixes) in realizing event readings with argument structure inherited from their causative, and respectively, anticausative base verbs. While previous literature claims that zero cannot realize the structurally more complex causative readings, and -ing cannot realize anticausative readings, our current results indicate that all three suffixes may realize both types of readings. This is in line with data attested in natural text corpora and suggests that zero suffixes are not necessarily structurally simpler than overt suffixes as often claimed in previous literature.

KEYWORDS (en)

anticausativity, causativity, -ing suffix, nominalization, Romance suffixes, zero suffix

DOI

https://doi.org/10.14712/18059635.2025.1.3

REFERENCES

Alexiadou, A., Anagnostopoulou, E. & Schäfer, F. (2009). PP licensing in nominalizations. In A. Schardl, M. Walkow & M. Abdurrahman (Eds.), Proceedings of NELS 38 (pp. 38–52). Amherst, MA: GLSA.

Alexiadou, A., Anagnostopoulou, E. & Schäfer, F. (2015). External arguments in transitivity alternations: A layering approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Alexiadou, A. & Grimshaw, J. (2008). Verbs, nouns, and affixation. In F. Schäfer (Ed.), Working Papers of the SFB 732 Incremental Specification in Context Vol. 1 (pp. 1–16). Stuttgart: Universität Stuttgart. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.18419/ opus-5695

Alexiadou, A., Iordăchioaia, G. & Soare, E. (2010). Number/Aspect Interactions in the Syntax of Nominalizations. Journal of Linguistics, 46(3), 537–574.

Alexiadou, A., Iordăchioaia, G., Cano, M., Martin, F. & Schäfer, F. (2013). The realization of external arguments in nominalizations. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, 16, 73–95.

Anwyl-Irvine, A. L., Massonnié, J., Flitton, A., Kirkham, N.Z., & Evershed, J. K. (2020). Gorilla in our midst: an online behavioural experiment builder. Behavior Research Methods, 52, 388–407.

Asher, N. (1993). Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Bates, D., Kliegel, R., Vasishth, S. & Baayen, H. (2015). Parsimonious mixed models. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/ abs/1506.04967,ms.,arXiv

Bates, M. M., Bolker, B. & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–48. Retrieved from https://dx.doi.org/10.18637/ jss.v067.i01

Bauer, L. & Valera, S. (2005). ‘Conversion or zero-derivation: An introduction’. In L. Bauer & S. Valera (Eds.), Approaches to conversion/ zero-derivation (pp. 7–17). Münster: Waxmann.

Beavers, J. & Koontz-Garboden, A. (2020). The Roots of Verbal Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Borer, H. (2013). Structuring sense: Volume III: Taking form. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cetnarowska, B. (1993). The Syntax, Semantics and Derivation of Bare Nominalisations in English. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego.

Dahl, E. & Fábregas, A. (2018). Zero morphemes. Oxford research encyclopedia of linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1093/ acrefore/9780199384655.013.592

Davies, M. (2008-). The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Retrieved from https://www.englishcorpora. org/coca/

Davies, M. (2013). Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE). Retrieved from https://www. englishcorpora.org/glowbe/

Davies, M. (2016-). Corpus of News on the Web (NOW). Retrieved from https://www.English-corpora.org/now/

Don, J. (1993). Morphological conversion [Doctoral dissertation, Utrecht University].

Don, J. (2005). On conversion, relisting and zero-derivation. SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics, 2(2), 2–16.

Dowty, D. (1979). Word Meaning and Montague Grammar. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Fábregas, A. (2014). Argument structure and morphologically underived nouns in Spanish and English. Lingua, 141, 97–120.

Farrell, P. (2001). Functional shift as category underspecification. English Language and Linguistics, 5(1), 109 ̶ 130.

Grafmiller, J. (2013). The Semantics of Syntactic Choice: An Analysis of English Emotion Verbs [Doctoral dissertation, Stanford University].

Grimshaw, J. (1990). Argument structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Harley, H. & Noyer, R. (2000). Formal versus encyclopedic properties of vocabulary: Evidence from nominalisations. In B. Peeters (Ed.), The Lexicon-Encyclopedia Interface (pp. 349–374). Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Huang, N., Almeida, D., & Sprouse, J. (in press). A nearly-exhaustive experimental investigation of bridge effects in English. To appear in Language. Retrieved from https:// www.jonsprouse.com/papers/Huang%20 et%20al.%20-%20bridge.pdf

Iordăchioaia, G. (2008). External argument PPs in Romanian nominalizations. In F. Schäfer (Ed.), Working Papers of the SFB 732 Incremental Specification in Context Vol. 1 (pp. 71–84). Stuttgart: OPUS. Retrieved from http://dx.doi. org/10.18419/opus-5695

Iordăchioaia, G. (2020). Categorization and nominalization in zero nominals. In A. Alexiadou & H. Borer (Eds.), Nominalization: 50 Years on from Chomsky’s Remarks (pp. 231–253). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Iordăchioaia, G. & Melloni, C. (2022). Zero-derived nouns and deverbal nominalization: Databases for English and Italian (1.0) [Dataset]. Zenodo. Retrieved from https://doi. org/10.5281/zenodo.6384134

Iordăchioaia, G. & Melloni, C. (2023a). The zero suffix in English and Italian deverbal nouns. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft — Journal of the Linguistic Society of Germany, 42(1), 109–32.

Iordăchioaia, G. & Melloni, C. (2023b). Zero affixes in derivational morphology: Introduction. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft — Journal of the Linguistic Society of Germany, 42(1), 1–11.

Iordăchioaia, G., Schweitzer, S., Svyryda, Y. & Buitrago Cabrera, C. M. (2020). Deverbal zero-nominalization and verb classes: Insights from a database. Zeitschrift für Wortbildung/ Journal of Word Formation, 4(2), 120–142.

Iordăchioaia, G. & Werner, M. (2019). Categorial shift via aspect and gender change in deverbal nouns. Language Sciences, 73, 62–76.

Kiparsky, P. (1982). From cyclic phonology to lexical phonology. In H. van der Hulst & N. Smith (Eds.), The structure of phonological representations (pp. 131–175). Dordrecht: Foris.

Kipper-Schuler, K. (2006). VerbNet: A Broad-coverage, Comprehensive Verb Lexicon [Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania].

Kratzer, A. (2003). The Event Argument and the Semantics of Verbs [Manuscript]. University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Retrieved from https://works.bepress.com/angelika_ kratzer/5/

Kratzer, A. (1996). Severing the external argument from its verb. In J. Rooryck & L. Zaring (Eds.), Phrase Structure and the Lexicon (pp. 109–137). Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Lenth, R. (2024). emmeans: Estimated Marginal Means, aka Least-Squares Means. R package version 1.10.4. Retrieved from https:// CRAN.R-project.org/package=emmeans.

Levin, B. (1993). English Verb Classes and Alternations. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Lieber, R. (1981). On the organization of the lexicon [Doctoral dissertation, University of New Hampshire].

Lieber, R. (2016). English Nouns. The Ecology of Nominalizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Marantz, A. (1997). No escape from syntax: Don’t try morphological analysis in the privacy of your own lexicon. In University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics Vol. 4.2 (pp. 201–225).

Marchand, H. (1969). The categories and types of present-day English word formation. München: C. H. Beck.

Marty, P., Chemla, E. & Sprouse, J. (2020). The effect of three basic task features on the sensitivity of acceptability judgment tasks. Glossa, 5, 1–23.

Meinschäfer, J. (2005). Deverbale Nominalisierungen im Französischen und Spanischen. Ein Modell der Schnittstelle von Syntax und Semantik [Habilitation thesis, University of Konstanz].

Newmeyer, F. (2009). Current challenges to the lexicalist hypothesis: An overview and a critique. In W. Lewis, S. Karimi, H. Harley, & S. Farrar (Eds.), Time and Again: Theoretical Perspectives on Formal Linguistics (pp. 91–117). Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Plag, I. (2003). Word-formation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ramchand, G. (2008). Verb Meaning and the Lexicon. A First Phase Syntax. London, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Rappaport Hovav, M. & Levin, B. (1998). Building Verb Meanings. In M. Butt & W. Geuder (Eds.), The Projection of Arguments: Lexical and Compositional Factors (pp. 97–134). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

Schäfer, F. (2009). The causative alternation. Language and Linguistics Compass, 3(2), 641–681.

Sichel, I. (2010). Event structure constraints in nominalization. In A. Alexiadou & M. Rathert (Eds.), The Syntax of Nominalizations across Languages and Frameworks (pp. 151–190). Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.

Smith, C. (1972). On causative verbs and derived nominals in English. Linguistic Inquiry, 3, 36–38.

Sprouse, J., & Almeida, D. (2017). Design sensitivity and statistical power in acceptability judgment experiments. Glossa, 2, 14.

Sprouse, J., Caponigro, I., Greco, C. & Cecchetto, C. (2016). Experimental syntax and the variation of island effects in English and Italian. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 34, 307–344.

Vendler, Z. (1968). Adjectives and Nominalizations. The Hague: Mouton.